What makes a good blog?
I follow a few different cooking blogs, and my boyfriend does a few video boat building blogs and I was trying to find that "it" factor from both of them. With the cooking blog, they definitely focus mostly on have few basic ingredients and go through recipes for all different dietary restrictions, and the boat building blog is an obvious niche subject. If creating a blog, should you have a specific topic you cover at first, and then try and expand your blog through different topics? Should I include videos in my blog?
Answers ( 1 )
What makes a good blog?
This is a little bit like asking "what makes good art?" The reasons why a person comes to a blog will vary with the kind of content the site offers, the audience it addresses and personal needs and opinion.
Basically there are several kinds of articles one finds on blogs blogs: News, insight, opinion, and review. Most blogs offer a mix of these, and the most successful one mix them in a way that makes the content an archive of information that can't be replicated by a Wikipedia article.
News can be up-to-date items of interest to the readership, things they might not find anywhere else. I started a weekly news report in the 2000s for my audience because, while many other sites included news of interest, no one else was aggregating news of interest tailored to my readership. So I did that.
Insight is a value-add for news. Sure you may read a headline, but having someone expert in the field interpret it, and explain why its important and how it affects you, is something for which we used to rely on journalists, but has fallen by the wayside in favor of opinion.
Opinion is easy. A review, a rant, a non-expert view of something...or even an expert with bias one way or another. Many successful blogs are basically a collection of editorials.There's nothing wrong with this, as long as the blogs are clear that non-expert opinion is not the same as insight...but few are.
Whether you call it a blog, or a digital magazine or a website, a mix of the above that provides your audience context, ability to understand a bigger picture and provides access to expertise and timely news is what I look for in a blog. Your mileage and the desires of your readership may vary.